NeuroRehabilitation, an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal focusing on neurologic rehabilitation, has announced the publication of a landmark study that identifies the top 100 most cited neurorehabilitation papers and reveals research trends in the field.
The findings are the result of a comprehensive citation analysis of neurorehabilitation papers published between January 2005 and April 2016. The aims were to identify the most frequently cited papers, the journals in which they were published, and authorship trends. The review also provides guidance for future neurorehabilitation research and highlights where there are deficiencies in the current literature.
This milestone analysis was led by Dr. Jeffrey S. Kreutzer, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Dr. Nathan S. Zasler, Concussion Care Centre of Virginia Ltd, supported by a team including, amongst others, Aaron A. Sorensen, a noted bibliometrics expert currently at the Digital Science Consultancy, and David Weedon, a publishing consultant, formerly Managing Director of Biology Reports Ltd.
The research findings show the steady growth in the field with the number of papers published in this field almost tripling over the course of 10 years, from just over 2500 papers in 2005 to nearing 7000 papers in 2015.
Much of the scientific inquiry in neurorehabilitation has been focused on advancing treatments for neurological disorders. The findings show that over the last decade, the field has been dominated by the study of stroke. The most frequently cited papers were published in the journals Stroke, Movement Disorders, and Neurology. Authorship trends suggest that top cited papers result from group endeavours. In total, 90 percent of the papers involved a collaboration among three or more authors, of which 6 percent had between 21 and 44 authors.
From a source of 52,581 papers published in 2781 journals (Web of Science), a candidate pool of the most cited neurorehabilitation papers published between 2005 and 2016 was reviewed by the authors.
The study also identified the top 50 journals in which the neurorehabilitation papers were published, along with the citation count. The top 10 from that list are: Stroke, 2360; Movement Disorders, 2181; Neurology, 1732; Epilepsia, 1552; European Journal of Neurology, 1130; International Journal of Stroke, 1119; Brain Injury, 954; Journal of Neurotrauma, 876; Multiple Sclerosis Journal, 831; and Journal of Neurology, 823.
The authors state that it is very likely substantial resources in neurorehabilitation have been dedicated to the study of stroke because stroke continues to be the leading cause of adult acquired disability in the United States and worldwide. The research clearly indicates that 'given the high incidence of neurotrauma and neurological disorders, the field of neurorehabilitation remains an important research area.'
The study was published in NeuroRehabilitation, Volume 40/Issue 2 (2017) by IOS Press. In addition to the complete lists of the top 100 most cited neurorehabilitation journal articles and the 50 journals in which the greatest concentration of neurorehabilitation papers were published, the article includes the de-novo keyword terms that were utilised in the search strategy. Due to the importance for the research community, is openly available online at: http://tiny.cc/top100neurorehab_PR.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
